If the volume is set too high the OpenAL backend preamplification leads
to overdriven sound samples. It's not quite understandable to me why
that only happen on platforms other than Linux (maybe a bug in OpenAL?)
and there's not much we can do against it besides reducing the volume.
As the side note: Simmilar behavior can be seen at least in ioQ3 and
dhewm3...
This cvar is a last resort if all other measures to prevent overdriven
preamplifation fail. Setting it to lower value than 1.0 limits the
overall dynamic range, so sound quality is lost. This is especially
hearable when low volume samples are encountered, like the shotgun
combined with the silencer.
The client uses float values between 0.0 and 1.0 to represent the volume
of sound samples. This is the range required by OpenAL. But the generic
part of the sound system multiplied the raw float value with 374 and
clamped it to a full integer. That worked by luck withth the OpenAL
backend but broke at least the silencer powerup. Solve this problem by
adding a new field "float oal_vol" to the channel_t struct and use it to
pass the raw float value to OpenAL.
This fixes issue #18
Since OpenAL 1.15 AL_GAIN has much more weight than before. That leeds
to overdriven effect samples unless the volume control is set to a very
low level. With this change volume can be set to a high level without
distorting. But there's one problem. A division by 2 is to low to rule
distortion out and by 3 the game is a little bit quieter than before. A
value of 2.5 would be optimal but is not applicable since the volume is
represented by an integer. I've choosen 3 to be aon the save side.
As a side note: This problem was very less worse on Linux than on
Windows and FreeBSD. Maybe Linux guys need to pump there volume up
to compensate this work-around.
These are the code changes and Makefile changes necessary to build and
run Yamagi Quake II on Max OS X. OS X 10.6 or higher is required, older
version may work but we cannot guarantee it. The documentation will be
added in another commit. This patch was contributed by W. Beser, I made
only some small cosmetical changes.
To archive this, 3 new functions Sys_GetProcAddress(), Sys_LoadLibrary()
and Sys_FreeLibrary() were added to abstract the library loading code
into a platform independend API.
caedes and some other people will probably kill me for this, but I'm the
idiot who has to maintain the code. And that's much easier if it's in a
readable und writeable state.
With sound quality "high" nearly all sound is provided as 16 bit PCM
with 2 channels. Since most players use this setting, provide an optimed
case for it. This should also solve the cracking due to overshot
soundbuffers, which was especially noticeable on Windows. This changes
only effects the old SDL soundbackend and not OpenAL.
If the game was compiled with openal support (USE_OPENAL is defined),
but it's disabled via cvar (set s_openal 0) there could be segfaults
when calls to openal where done anyway, because the check
if(sound_started == SS_OAL) was forgotten.
This is fixed now.
This fixes a crash in mine4.bsp and most likely some other problems.
The bug was reported by "mxmvasilyev0 [at] gmail [dot] com" and tracked
as Github issue #1.
